Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @08:47AM
from the brand-awareness dept.

MojoKid (1002251) writes AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it's probably not something you'd expect. It's not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD's new SSDs and you'll see OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance.

Usually you're buying through a website that has pictures and the word "SSD" next to it, so unless you're mailing them a letter with some cash asking for an R7 I dont think its gonna be that big of a problem. The sorts of people who buy (and know how to install) SSDs and GPUs tend to be the sorts of people who can differentiate the two.

Govconnection, which is one of our vendors, quite often has no pictures on their products, and minimal descriptions. Ordering the wrong thing because two products had a similar name would be a real possibility.

Why would Toshiba having bought OCZ make me any more willing to trust them? I've been burned far worse by Toshiba (whose salespeople lied to me to make a sale and whose support people refused to honour my warranty) than by OCZ.

Somewhat inexpensive, but not quite so cheap that losing a SSD to a premature defect wouldn't sting a bit. In my neck of the woods, a 256GB SSD still costs around 150 Euros.

Unlike GP, I might take a chance on a product with less than 5 years of warranty if the vendor has a track record for good quality. OCZ does not, and I doubt if the acquisition by Toshiba has instantly fixed things. Or if Toshiba branded SSDs have not suffered from the bad influence;-)

Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.

Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEM

I thought AMD chips are competitive in some parts of the market (not top-end, though). The last chip I bought was an AMD A10 - 4 cpu cores and 6 graphic cores on the one die. It saves having to buy a separate graphic card and the graphic cores have full access to the same memory that the CPU cores use which I think is an interesting architecture.

I thought AMD chips are competitive in some parts of the market (not top-end, though). The last chip I bought was an AMD A10 - 4 cpu cores and 6 graphic cores on the one die. It saves having to buy a separate graphic card and the graphic cores have full access to the same memory that the CPU cores use which I think is an interesting architecture.

I realize that it is entirely anecdotal, but my miserable early experience with OCZ disks seems to match others, to the point that would never in a million years purchase another OCZ product again. Heck, it seems mighty telling that they're not even considered on the tech report longetivity test:

Given how many of the OCZ problems were put down to shoddy firmware and crap handling of warranties I wonder how much of what made OCZ the crap brand it was is really in this drive. I got burned by them too but there's always hippie once a sensible company takes over.

Seems a good bet if you want reliability: in the last paragraph of Guru3D's review [guru3d.com], they say:

the AMD Radeon R7 SSD series is very fast, has a greatly refined Barefoot controller with accompanying firmware and Toshiba's latest A19nm NAND flash memory. It is a product you'll like and use for a long time. I also dare to state that it is one of the most reliable product on the market anno 2014, combined with the excellent new ShieldPlus warranty this is a pure win in our book, and as such it comes very much recommended by Guru3D.com

Maybe an OCZ with a sticker, but who cares, really? Quality product, good price. Not much to hate here.

good bet if you want reliability limited to 43TB of writes. Or did you miss that small print in the warranty?

No one will read the warranty.When they send it in they'll be denied with an explanation of "You wrote too much to this drive, see? This hidden, unreliable, untrustworthy counter in the firmware says so.".

This is going to backfire horribly. First, it should never have gotten a Radeon name, let alone Radeon R7, which is a (damn good) GPU product line. Second, they partnered with the worst, shittiest name-brand SSD vendor. Of course there are much worse SSDs, but those are all generic crap. OCZ is known to take short-cuts in the name of speed, and screw it up when it comes to reliability.

nVidia tried something like this once, anyone remember their chipsets? It was *UTTER CRAP* full of errata, and with sup

1. Radeon R7, now for SSDs? How confusing and utterly stupid. The geniuses couldn't be bothered to come up with a new name?

2. OCZ and their reputation. AMD and their reputation. Whatever reviewers may say, those in the know will stay away, and if these drives crap out as well, OCZ will now stain AMD as well (not that they needed any more of that).

2. AMD has a somewhat tarnished reputation for the performance of their FX CPU line. So far, NOT over lack of reliability. I hope they won't acquire that now...

[digression]From Nvidia, the only really bad thing I remember is that their mobile Geforce 8xxx had a reputation for dieing early. The 8600 GT in particular.They are known for not caring about Open Source, and that is why I would currently prefer an AMD GPU (even if the GeForce 750 Ti looks really nice in terms of perfor

nVidia actually did sell it pretty well though. It wasn't in any way a better experience, but the brand name did actually carry the product as I recall.

It was one of the reasons that the relationship between Intel and nVidia went so far south, Intel made it impossible to have third party chipsets and nVidia lost some revenue opportunity. People rightly critical of the technical aspects were not the downfall of the product line, Intel locking down their platform was.

Considering how a lot of problems with SSDs are generally related to various obscure firmware bugs and considering just how horrible ATI/AMD is at writing software for their hardware, I would run for my fucking life.

>480GB>Endurance Rated for 30GB/day host writes for 4 years under typical client workloads

for math challenged: this is 43TB of written data, after that your guarantee is VOID and NULL

43TB on a 480TB drive, this is more than a joke, this is spitting in your face. This comes from Toshiba - manufacturer of both controller and flash memory, party that is best informed about REAL endurance capabilities of that combo.

In case you are wondering - Samsung doesnt impose any write limitations on their 3 year guarantee for 840 EVO drives. Both drives look pretty much the same in tests.

for math challenged: this is 43TB of written data, after that your guarantee is VOID and NULL

...

In case you are wondering - Samsung doesnt impose any write limitations on their 3 year guarantee for 840 EVO drives. Both drives look pretty much the same in tests.

Where are you getting this "guarantee VOID and NULL" from? The warranty is "4 years". There is nothing in the AMD press release about the limitations of their warranty.

I looked up OCZ and Samsung's SSD warranties, and did see a blurb about "normal wear and tear" for OCZ's warranty. But even though AMD is using OCZ components, they are not limited to OCZ's warranties.

I will also submit that averaging 30GB/day of writes on an SSD for 4 years straight is not "normal wear and tear".

Their claim is they are focusing on reliability and write endurance but it looks like they have some of the lowest endurance in the industry.

Even the drive it is supposed to be a bit of a clone from is rated much higher.

AMD R7: 4GB for 4 years = 43TB (Odd that they don't say this is dependent on drive size, which it would be.OCZ Vector 150: 50GB for 5 years = 91 TB (Also not scaled for drive size)Samsung 840: 1000 cycles. In their smallest drive this would be around 120 TB. Samsung is using lower endurance TLC here so this is even more odd.Intel 730: 70TB over their 5 year warranty is 127 TB Highest of them all for MLC.

Now in real life, the AMD and OCZ drives may go much further before they fail, but you have to go off of their ratings for comparisons or all hell breaks loose (Tests have shown the Samsung drives lasting over 3000 cycles before beginning to reallocate sectors). Especially for the larger drives (A 240GB drive should have double the write endurance of a 120GB drive).

So yeah I find it odd that endurance is one of their talking points when they have by far the lowest endurance of any of the common drives out there, including the supposedly very similar Vector 150.

Somebody has to say it. Anybody who would so much as touch with a 10 foot pole any SSD contaminated with the OCZ brand needs to have his head examined. Please, don't anybody claim they don't know the sad infamous history of OCZ SSDs.

OCZ crashed and burned its goodwill in the industry for a reason.Toshiba, one of the most customer-hostile electronics companies I've ever come across bought them.

Sure, Toshiba COULD have improved the OCZ line drastically. At this point, it's a Zenith-type brand label and nothing more.And if it means having to deal with those noxious pricks at Toshiba? NO FUCKING WAY IN HELL!

I'd rather buy something like a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro and film myself:Running software to burn it over it's write limits till it dies.Repeatedly throw it on the ground from the top of a 10 story building.Run over it with a forklift a couple times.Douse it in lighter fluid and light it up.Wipe my ass with the remains.Emasculate myself with an ice cream scooper.

Then try to the drive, the video and the schlong into Samsung demanding warranty service.I'd have better luck with everything working out okay than I would for even a minor problem with Toshiba.